Chaos Bolt: How to make everybody happy

[Supernex]

Pretty much, yeah. Like I said, I had an outdated mechanic in mind when I made that argument, but i agree with your last post.

---------- Post added 2012-11-06 at 09:12 PM ----------



Should have said "some more" i guess heh. RoF no longuer requires immolate and ticks twice as fast.

It regens embers without Immolate already as well, (but you are correct that it will tick faster come 5.1).

[Terahertz]

The crit for a full geared person isnt too high, 80k aprox. I think is well but if u compare against and learn crys about ungeared people obviously is OP.

80k without CDs maybe.

Chaos Bolt I can sort of deal with. Like you said, reduce cast time and reduce dmg while putting the damage into something else (Perhaps buff incinerate damage instead or something?). But Chaos Wave is even more ridiculous. Instant cast ability critting for 90-100k with two charges is really stupid.

[Tya]

My paladin can share a few words with you about that

The BG was Battle for Gilneas, and neither me or the lock had Berserking, i have a 56,26% damage reduction, and this is what a "happy lock" shared with me:



You think thats normal on a "PvP situation"? Because i dont, and while i admit that those numbers arent common (i normally recieve the half of that), when it happens i remember the days when people complained about the Lay of Hands, people didnt like to see a paladin recovering the 100% of his healt in 1 CD (in one long CD), but today you see that many locks are "happy" (im not saying that there is this kind of people here) with "having the chance to delete in 1 shot" :s

Reducing the damage of the CB and distributing that damage in other spells looks ok, it has been done in other classes and they work perfectly, i dont see where is the problem (well, yes, some people enjoy seeing "big crit numbers"). I really hope they do something, but not something that sends the lock "to the ground", of course

Liar.

CB hits for 180k from a well-geared lock onto a well-geared paladin. He either had berserking, or your gear sucks.

[Jessicka]

Well theorically that is not true, I mean kiting + shields pretty much does exactly that to warriors. But that being said, you do have a point that in realistic situations it is harder for us to build ressources.

However, that is where the buffed ember generation comes into play. With Conflag and RoF generating some next patch, with the correct number tweaking that fear of yours could easily be aleviated.

Again: go back and re-read the OP please, because when you keep arguing that nothing needs changing because people will learn to counter CB, you are ignoring half of it:

I explained on the previous page why none of your suggestions really stand:

- Increased Ember generation would increase damage across the board, this would mean either the burst that is made available would become proportionally less effecive in relation to the Ember generation increase. Alternately, base damage could be reduced, but this would substantially hurt the capacity for the spec to apply pressure, and excaserbate the 'eggs in one basket' issue of Chaos Bolt.

- Spreading out the burst across more casts keeps our present vulnerabilities in terms of being forced to Ember Tap, and having our Ember generation throttled by opposition play; while opening us up more to reactive defenses: Remember defensive abilities no longer work against projectiles in flight.

[Deleted]

Liar.

CB hits for 180k from a well-geared lock onto a well-geared paladin. He either had berserking, or your gear sucks.

Its isnt a lie, i win nothing doing it. As i have said, i have about 56,26% dmg reduction from players, and no, none of both had Berserking. And yes, maybe my gear isnt the best (need to change some gems and some blues), but that doesnt change the fact that even with the Resilence i have, i recieve (as i said, its sometimes, not always) hits like that.

here i leave you my armory if you want to look at my char: http://eu.battle.net/wow/es/characte...oator/advanced

Dont ask me why the tabard and shoulders are invisible, armory bug i suppose :s

[Nivrax]

It really depends on what buffs and procs Warlock have. In PvE gear, all buffs avaible, 6k unbuffed mastery, 484 ilvl, Dark Soul, synapse springs, tailor chant, dmc proc, cosmos proc, potion etc. I managed to land 700k Chaos Bolt on Blade Lord. After reduction of 40-50% due to resilience, it would be 350k. 240k is possible, just require buffs (3k mastery especially) and decent procs up.

[Deleted]

Give Immolate and Rain of Fire ticks 100% chance to generate an emberbit (double effect on crits just like every other spell), buff the damage of our ember generating spells by 5%-10% (Inci, Conflag, Fel Flame, Immo) and then you have my permission to nerf the Chaos Bolt damage by 10%.

This should help with:
- toning down pvp burst.
- buffing destro pve damage slightly.
- Buffing Immolate, which is a pretty weak spell for a dot atm.
- Give a more reliable resource (re)generation when aoeing fewer than 7 targets. Not being able to properly aoe in 10man compared to 25man because of ember starving sucks.


The current 3 second dot is a pretty lame idea even if it may do the job of toning down pvp damage. Think about getting 6 Backdraft charges and casting 2x Chaos Bolts in a row (this is not be a bad idea if you want to kill an add asap in pve). It is already a dps loss to cast backdrafted chaos bolt, this change would gimp the move even more.

[Grubjuice]

that much of an increase to all other spells would surely warrant a larger nerf to chaos bolt that only 10%
it would also force Rain of Fire into the Single Target ratation, and i am pretty sure blizzard is trying to avoid that.

[Phoenexis]

I explained on the previous page why none of your suggestions really stand:

- Increased Ember generation would increase damage across the board, this would mean either the burst that is made available would become proportionally less effecive in relation to the Ember generation increase. Alternately, base damage could be reduced, but this would substantially hurt the capacity for the spec to apply pressure, and excaserbate the 'eggs in one basket' issue of Chaos Bolt.

- Spreading out the burst across more casts keeps our present vulnerabilities in terms of being forced to Ember Tap, and having our Ember generation throttled by opposition play; while opening us up more to reactive defenses: Remember defensive abilities no longer work against projectiles in flight.

Increasing Ember generation and sustained damage while nerfing the obscene Havoc + Shadowburn should put us on good terms, I don't think we'd be too OP. Furthermore, I think that reducing chaos bolt's effect in relation to ember generation should be toned down. When you're not using embers on chaos bolt, you're losing on a lot. FoX and Ember Tap show that.

By spreading burst around multiple faster casts, you get more mobility and better fake-casts. If you shoot two spells, go on the move and continue, you're losing out on less than if you're waiting for a 3 second cast to finish four times in a row. It also becomes less obvious and easy to counter since damage is spread among multiple attacks, and doesn't completely shut us down when we get interrupted.

I can't see how having this change could be a bad thing.

[Deleted]

How about simply remove Chaos Bolt from the list of Backdraft affected spells?

In PVE you rarely want to cast backdrafted Chaos Bolts anyway.
In PVP this would give room for stun/interrupt/fear/etc, los, or use of a defensive cooldown. After all, for 3 sec (during the cast of Chaos Bolt) you barely do any damage, so your target gets time to heal or setup whatever he/she wants to counter the Chaos Bolt. Haste in PvP is low enough so that the cast time of Chaos Bolt should stay close to 3 seconds (even with haste stacking, which is nowhere near ideal, the cast time wouldn't go down to 2.5 seconds).

[Tya]

Its isnt a lie, i win nothing doing it. As i have said, i have about 56,26% dmg reduction from players, and no, none of both had Berserking. And yes, maybe my gear isnt the best (need to change some gems and some blues), but that doesnt change the fact that even with the Resilence i have, i recieve (as i said, its sometimes, not always) hits like that.

here i leave you my armory if you want to look at my char: http://eu.battle.net/wow/es/characte...oator/advanced

Dont ask me why the tabard and shoulders are invisible, armory bug i suppose :s

It is a lie. I've clocked hundreds of hours as destro since 5.1. On 60% resi, with every cd up, CB hits for 180k. Now, you don't quite have 60% resi, and 180k*berserker is 234k. It's obvious that he had berserking.

If you don't believe me, ask a geared warlock to CB you. It'll hit you for ~180k.

---------- Post added 2012-11-07 at 09:19 PM ----------

How about simply remove Chaos Bolt from the list of Backdraft affected spells?

In PVE you rarely want to cast backdrafted Chaos Bolts anyway.
In PVP this would give room for stun/interrupt/fear/etc, los, or use of a defensive cooldown. After all, for 3 sec (during the cast of Chaos Bolt) you barely do any damage, so your target gets time to heal or setup whatever he/she wants to counter the Chaos Bolt. Haste in PvP is low enough so that the cast time of Chaos Bolt should stay close to 3 seconds (even with haste stacking, which is nowhere near ideal, the cast time wouldn't go down to 2.5 seconds).

Destro is unviable at high ratings. Nigh all high rated warlocks are demo or aff. http://www.crossladder.com/arena/ladder/m=players;c=9

Why? CB+cooldowns is so easy to stop that only bad players get hit by it. Removing CB from Backdraft, well...

[Kildragon]

Removing CB from backdraft would break the spec. It's literally the only way to get CB off at all. Worst suggestions I've heard in a while. The only thing would be getting the change to cb reduced cast time that xel promised us but never came through with.

As for jess, your logic doesn't make much sense atm. First of all, forcing the lock to ember tap is a terrible argument. Good destro locks never get sat anyways because they are impossible to kill. Most teams don't care about our ember generation because our one good spell is easy to counter. They ignore us until we try to cast.

As for your reactive cd argument, it's simply not true. If a team has X cds against us they can't just keep popping them cause they are limited. Right now we're extremely susceptible to those cds because of the all or nothing playstyle. With more casts we are less susceptible because we can get more casts of.

Your damage argument also doesn't make sense. You mentioned only ember generation saying it would buff damage across the board. In actuality it would only increase cb damage not across the board. Plus you just happened to leave out the reduced cast time and damage of CB which would offset the change. A reduction to cast time and damage alone would only cripple the spec because the cost hasn't changed. If you don't want to increase ember generation we could always reduce the ember cost while reducing the damage and cast time.

[Jessicka]

Your damage argument also doesn't make sense. You mentioned only ember generation saying it would buff damage across the board. In actuality it would only increase cb damage not across the board. Plus you just happened to leave out the reduced cast time and damage of CB which would offset the change. A reduction to cast time and damage alone would only cripple the spec because the cost hasn't changed. If you don't want to increase ember generation we could always reduce the ember cost while reducing the damage and cast time.

When I said it increases damage across the board, I meant across the profile. With more Embers, you can use Chaos Bolt more, which means more overall damage - that's not tenable given the impact on PvE. There's some small scope for buffing PvE, but the amount of buffing to be noticable in PvP would be grossly overpowerd in PvE without a considerable nerf to Chaos Bolt, and I didn't leave that out, I addressed it clearly. You nerf CB, you nerf the burst potential and thus the burst itself is weaker - if you're happier with weaker burst (burst being about all we have) that's fine; I wouldn't be.

[Nikijih]

When I said it increases damage across the board, I meant across the profile. With more Embers, you can use Chaos Bolt more, which means more overall damage - that's not tenable given the impact on PvE. There's some small scope for buffing PvE, but the amount of buffing to be noticable in PvP would be grossly overpowerd in PvE without a considerable nerf to Chaos Bolt, and I didn't leave that out, I addressed it clearly. You nerf CB, you nerf the burst potential and thus the burst itself is weaker - if you're happier with weaker burst (burst being about all we have) that's fine; I wouldn't be.

I think get what it is you dont get... more chaos bolt does NOT mean more overall damage if each chaos bolt deals appropriately less damage.

[pokeadott]

Nerf cooldown CB. Buff my ability to kill things outside of cooldowns.

Can argue the numbers all you like, but getting a 180kish CB with CDs popped is too high for one spell that can be timed to land with at least 2 others (FF/Conflag) that can reliably spike you for 280K+. I don't even give up in 3s anymore because maybe if my pally and I can dick around enough to have DS back up we can still RNG a win. It's too much damage for a single ability... in a perfect world. But considering what Mages/Warriors/Hunters/Shadow/Rets/DKs can do in a similar number of globals - it's not entirely out of place. All those specs need their burst toned way the fuck down along with Destro. We get slightly higher top end with significantly more rampup. I hate it.

Nerfing CB kills the spec, but I wouldn't mind it if Destro damage was completely re-worked to model mages/shadow/elle (repeatable burst, easy set-up, 20-30sec kill windows). Since Bliz is stubborn/lazy and doesn't want to make a lot of tweaks for pvp (outdated design philosophy in a persistent online world imo), I can't see that happening any time soon, so I will just assume we're screwed.

Go look at the LK damage model for Destro in pvp (CB/Conflag every 20ish seconds producing a viable kill window with some good crits - easy to setup and execute, doesn't one-shot). Give me a mop version of that and I'm very happy. I'm not holding my breath.

[darkminaz]

just go back to cata
chaosbolt does 70% instant the other 30% over 10sec
or 50%,50% would take the "boom" out but still not fuck it up totaly in pve

[Deleted]

Yes please make our nice cleave need adds that last at least 15 seconds.

[Phoenexis]

When I said it increases damage across the board, I meant across the profile. With more Embers, you can use Chaos Bolt more, which means more overall damage - that's not tenable given the impact on PvE. There's some small scope for buffing PvE, but the amount of buffing to be noticable in PvP would be grossly overpowerd in PvE without a considerable nerf to Chaos Bolt, and I didn't leave that out, I addressed it clearly. You nerf CB, you nerf the burst potential and thus the burst itself is weaker - if you're happier with weaker burst (burst being about all we have) that's fine; I wouldn't be.

But you forget that Destruction's viability partly lies on Havoc + Shadowburn. Nerf that and compensate it with what we're proposing, what's to lose?

[Jessicka]

I think get what it is you dont get... more chaos bolt does NOT mean more overall damage if each chaos bolt deals appropriately less damage.

I think I do...

When I said it increases damage across the board, I meant across the profile. With more Embers, you can use Chaos Bolt more, which means more overall damage - that's not tenable given the impact on PvE. There's some small scope for buffing PvE, but the amount of buffing to be noticable in PvP would be grossly overpowerd in PvE without a considerable nerf to Chaos Bolt, and I didn't leave that out, I addressed it clearly. You nerf CB, you nerf the burst potential and thus the burst itself is weaker - if you're happier with weaker burst (burst being about all we have) that's fine; I wouldn't be.

What I don't think you get, is that for the increase to be perceptibable and useful you'd be looking at least a 30% buff to Ember generation, which in turn means a comparable nerf to CB, significantly reducing our available burst without an increase to the Ember cap - which would in turn defeat the object of increasing the generation rate in the first place.

Nerf cooldown CB. Buff my ability to kill things outside of cooldowns.

Can argue the numbers all you like, but getting a 180kish CB with CDs popped is too high for one spell that can be timed to land with at least 2 others (FF/Conflag) that can reliably spike you for 280K+. I don't even give up in 3s anymore because maybe if my pally and I can dick around enough to have DS back up we can still RNG a win. It's too much damage for a single ability... in a perfect world. But considering what Mages/Warriors/Hunters/Shadow/Rets/DKs can do in a similar number of globals - it's not entirely out of place. All those specs need their burst toned way the fuck down along with Destro. We get slightly higher top end with significantly more rampup. I hate it.

Nerfing CB kills the spec, but I wouldn't mind it if Destro damage was completely re-worked to model mages/shadow/elle (repeatable burst, easy set-up, 20-30sec kill windows). Since Bliz is stubborn/lazy and doesn't want to make a lot of tweaks for pvp (outdated design philosophy in a persistent online world imo), I can't see that happening any time soon, so I will just assume we're screwed.

Go look at the LK damage model for Destro in pvp (CB/Conflag every 20ish seconds producing a viable kill window with some good crits - easy to setup and execute, doesn't one-shot). Give me a mop version of that and I'm very happy. I'm not holding my breath.

This is a reggressive step. Having said that, there is the Glyph of Dark Soul which in effect does this, just not to such a large extreme as you seem to want.

---------- Post added 2012-11-08 at 11:30 AM ----------

But you forget that Destruction's viability partly lies on Havoc + Shadowburn. Nerf that and compensate it with what we're proposing, what's to lose?

Nerfing cleave damage to increase already viable single target damage wont happen.

[akon]

Liar.

CB hits for 180k from a well-geared lock onto a well-geared paladin. He either had berserking, or your gear sucks.

In the same photo we can still see 1 instnat heal that does the same dmg with conflagrate,consider that i am still not conviced from u ppl demand nerf cb